


I wish my heart was as cold as the morning dew

by buttface



Series: cabaletta [3]
Category: Show By Rock!! - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Related, M/M, Memories, Missing Persons, POV Second Person, POV Second Person: Rom, less missing scene more missing several years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:41:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25096276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttface/pseuds/buttface
Summary: You were happy once. Amatelast, all of you, and the two of you specifically. It seems so hard to imagine now.
Relationships: Rom/Shu Zo (Show By Rock!!)
Series: cabaletta [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1688323
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	I wish my heart was as cold as the morning dew

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly me trying to extrapolate a timeline from Fes-A-Live, plus some Amatelast canon reverse engineered from comments by people who have actually read the Comiket magazine interview. And the constant lurking possibility of Cross Ambivalence, though it hasn't happened yet in this universe. 
> 
> I am dubious that there actually exists a consistent canon timeline for Rom and Shuu/zo's lives, but this is what I'm working from for the purpose of this series, anyway. Rom has been through a lot of shit, huh?
> 
> Title for this and probably the whole rest of this series tbh from Camera Obscura. If you want some romshuu emotions, just play through the entirety of My Maudlin Career.
> 
> My eternal gratitude to Kii for a few lines I stole and for accidentally encouraging me to keep doing this.

You were happy once. Amatelast, all of you, and the two of you specifically. It seems so hard to imagine now. You don’t really remember how it worked; you never thought you’d have to _remember_. It just happened. You all practiced and fought and made up and laughed and went to work together and went home together and everything felt so natural that you never had to contemplate how it worked. You just _were_ , you didn’t know any different.

(Maybe that’s what growing up is. The time when your relationships stop working without you putting effort into them, when you’re supposed to have learned how to do better.)

You were nominally band leader but it was Shuu who made all the creative decisions. And to be honest you didn't mind at all. He had _something_ none of the rest of you did. It was like watching him do magic. He always talked about all of you making him shine, but it was him who knew how to bring something strong and bright out of all of you on stage. You just had to look after the band the rest of the time.

He sauntered into practice one day with a tailor’s tape measure, insisting that you all needed proper outfits. “We have the music, but to change the world we need more than that.”

“We’re changing the world, are we?”

“Not in the same t-shirt and jeans you’ve been wearing for three years we aren’t.”

You watched him hand Adam an elaborate outfit, pinning and stitching until he was satisfied with how it hung. You watched him hand Eve half a mesh top and tight pants that only drew the eye back up to his practically bare chest and powerful shoulders. You watched him sew more and more trim onto his own long black jacket. And you waited and waited for him to bring you a gift of your own.

“You should wear some black pants or something,” he mused when you eventually cornered him about it. “Otherwise you’re breaking up the color scheme. Not that anyone can really see it behind your drums.”

“Shuu, what gives? You gave everyone else elaborate outfits. You named everyone else’s instruments. I just get ‘wear some black pants or something’?”

You remember him waving his hand vaguely, frowning. “I can see them from the outside. I know what people will see when they look at them and how to present them to the audience to maximum benefit. I don’t know how to see you like that. You’re just … Rom. That’s enough.”

“... Can I put a shirt on?”

He was sparing with his smiles in those days, but the ones he did give were brilliant. “Don’t you dare.”

You still did sometimes, not least to make him look at you and pout. But it never lasted long on stage, in the stale air of those clubs and the sweat of your muscles working. That’s fine. Taking it off got him to look at you again.

You told yourself that you were the one who mediated between him and the world, the one who understood him. The grounded one, the practical one, the one who took care of the details so that he could be free to be creative. You thought you needed each other.

Maybe it’s not so good to need each other.

But it was good practice learning to handle intense personalities. There’s little that any of Shingancrimsonz can throw at you now that can outdo Shuu in one of his moods; you may not _understand_ it, but you get it. This is what you do well, you look after temperamental artistic sorts and try to keep them fed and moving and mostly doing the productive kind of fighting. There are worse things to accomplish with a life. 

(You think sometimes about how if it wasn’t for Amatelast breaking up, Shingancrimsonz would never have existed. Maybe it was all worth it just for that. Maybe. It’s impossible to say that kind of thing, and it’s never fair to either side.

It’s not the same, and that’s not so bad. They aren’t replacements, they’re a new start. You aren’t the same person, either; you never will be again. There will always be moments that you fear you’ll lose one of them again, that you’ll have to watch the band fall apart, that you’re running too late and too far behind to ever reach what once seemed within your grasp. Things you didn’t know to fear then. But they’ve taken you places Amatelast never did, either. They taught you to be passionate again; they gave you back your pride as a man. You can take care of them better than you could take care of Amatelast, you can be more reliable for them. And they always come through for you.)

When he disappeared you spent months just trying to find him. Asking around in clubs, haunting record stores in hopes you’d just happen to run into him. You never had to make an effort to see him before and suddenly he was nowhere. You didn’t know what you would do if you did find him, but at least you’d know that he was okay. That what he said that night wouldn’t be the last interaction you ever had. 

For the first few days you could tell yourself it was just another fight, that he'd be back soon with a hell of a song to make up for it. You could _tell_ yourself that, at least, but you didn't really believe it. You fought over riffs and dinner and clothes and whose turn it was to do the dishes, but your dream was _sacred_. He wouldn't have said that if he didn't mean for it to leave a scar.

You stopped taking shifts at work, begging Adam and Eve to cover for you. Eventually you stopped calling them, either. You didn’t know how to interact with them anymore; no matter what you talked about, you’d all be thinking the same thing. You couldn’t keep playing as a band without him, but you couldn’t replace him either, not without closure from how he left. Maybe you could have stayed friends if you’d been able to stop thinking about Shuu long enough, but that’s something none of you ever learned.

You don’t know where they are these days. You assume they don’t much want to see you after all that. if you run into them, you’ll apologize. For now, best to let the past lie.

The cops told you it’s not against the law for an adult to go missing of his own volition and there wasn’t anything they could do for you. “Please,” you begged them, “you have to help me. I’m his - I’m his band leader.” The look they gave you left you too embarrassed to even swing a punch, not that landing yourself in a cell would have done anybody any good. 

Maybe you should have said “boyfriend”. It was true, after all. You just thought he’d care more about the band part.

The darkmonster attacks became more and more frequent and you wondered at times if he was out there somewhere, form twisted and self forgotten, waiting for you to heroically return to your drums and save him. That maybe he only did what he did because of something dark rising up within him, something that only you could fix. Such a romantic idea. After all, it was that or he really meant everything he said to you that night and he left because he wanted to be gone.

Eventually you had to move on, make a new life. Your fire had burnt out, sputtered to sodden ashes, but you still had to pay the rent. You learned accountancy because it felt about as far as you could get from your old life; you gave yourself to a company that exploited you and demanded all your time leaving you blessedly free of quiet moments to remember; you stayed out all night in karaoke boxes pretending it didn’t mean anything. 

Who knows what would have happened if Maple hadn’t pulled your sorry ass back into music before Shuu☆zo suddenly appeared. You’re not sure you could have taken that blow without your band to help cushion it. When he left, he took your fire with him; you have your own fire now, with them. You don’t need him. If he wants to stand astride the world, then that just makes him easier to hit once you get up there.

It was a hell of a thing the first time you saw him again, though. A ghost towering over you in bright lights, the voice that haunted you for so long echoing blithely through speakers. Different in all the details, like a memory that’s warped through too many retellings, but you would know him anywhere.

You still catch yourself thinking of Shuu in the past tense, like he’s dead, even though you see his face a dozen times on your daily commute. You _are_ glad he was safe all that time, for the sake of the time you had together. But it still means you fell in love with someone who was comfortable letting you think for years that he might be dead.

(You did love him. Neither of you can rewrite that part of your history, as much as you might like to. It’s the only way to understand everything that happened.)

And yet, after all that, you let him into your home again. You let him lie in your bed and make his excuses. You do believe him, it sounds exactly like the kind of story he’d cast himself in the lead of, but it doesn’t change what he’s done.

It’s too late for an explanation to be enough. You don’t know what _would_ be enough; maybe there is nothing. He can’t give you those years of your life back. You shouldn’t give him any more of your time.

(You will.)

**Author's Note:**

> The more I think about it the harder it is to hold the belief that Shuu☆zo did nothing wrong ever in his life but just you watch me try anyway
> 
> I've taken the most melodramatic possible read on this, as is my god-given right as a fan. It's entirely possible that they were actually in touch at some point during Shuu's whole "dramatic breakup->go overseas to train->suddenly reappear in Midi City to form Trichronika" thing, but Cross Ambivalence implies that *neither* of them have talked to Adam and Eve since that night (which I've fudged a bit obviously). Also I just love to imagine Rom just trying to go out for a decent coffee between meetings one day and suddenly jesus fucking fuck there's all his fears and dreams and anxieties projected in bright lights a hundred feet tall with absolutely no warning


End file.
